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Well for this purpose it means to determine the type of migration you are going to have and then determine all of the tasks that need to be in place to make it successful.

You will need to decide what type of migration you are going to do:
• In-Place Update
• Lift and Shift
• Map and restructure

In-Place: This is really more for the on -premise migrations that are going to do a in place database upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint. You will still want to follow best practice and do the upgrade first on a mirrored dev/test environment to ensure it will not have any ill effects.

Lift and Shift: This is usually what is used to migrate to Office 365 and keeping the same site hierarchy and structure in place just moving it to the cloud. This will require a lot more preparation to ensure it is successful and we will cover that in the next few weeks.

Map and restructure: This can also be done when you are migrating to O365 and requires a complete site audit of all content and mapping the content to the new hierarchy in the new online environment.

Prioritize the scenarios for the execution

With all of these options you do not just want to jump in blindly. You will want to determine all of the task that need to be done, the order they need to be executed and who the owners of these tasks are going to be. They can be one or two people or an entire team. Making sure you have individuals that will be invested and take an active ownership role is key to staying on track.

Create site road-map

You will want to evaluate your current site and create a site map. This will help you determine just how deep and what sites and content are really on the environment. I can’t tell you how many times when starting these type of projects I run into customers who have no idea the size and depth their SharePoint environment really is. This will also help you in your content audit and to determine if the current hierarchy is the right one or if you need to think about creating a better structure for your sites.

There are several ways that you can automate the site map process. Inside SharePoint you can go to the “/_layouts/15/vsubwebs.aspx” at the site collection level and it will provide you a list of the entire Site Hierarchy structure. From here you can copy and paste into Word or Excel.

Visio has the ability to connect to a SharePoint environment and crawl that space to create the site map, as do Publisher.

Several third party tools are available as well that can be used to crawl the environment as well as create a site map of all of the sites and list and libraries of each of the sites as well. Metavis, Metalogix and ShareGate are excellent options and all of the offer trial version so you can test drive them to see if they will meet your needs long term for the migration of the content.